NGEL:
In the mainstream media, there are three parties: the Republicans, the
Democrats, and the whacko fringe lunatics. That's understood. But lately, in
many so-called alternative media outlets, mostly websites, I see support for
Kucinich or even Dean as the only "realistic" alternative to another four
years of Bush.

Having seen the Democrats roll over and die on
literally every "defense" issue put before them since "the day that changed
the world," (9/11) I can't believe that the "only alternative" is yet
another Democrat. What are they/we afraid of?

HERMAN: You are overlooking the fact
that the electoral system now in place in this country is so plutocratic, so
skewed, so anti-populist that even a populist Democrat like Kucinich doesn’t
have a chance to win a nomination let alone a final electoral triumph. The
left is essentially outside the system, small, fragmented and even beyond
marginalization. So if leftists want to participate in the election at all
they can run (or support) a populist candidate who will be competing with
the two major parties, and get smashed, or they can try to throw their puny
weight toward getting a lesser evil Democrat nominated and a lesser evil
Democrat elected to national office. They have a third option—steering
entirely clear of the elections and going about other business like grass
roots organization, trying to build alternative media and other projects
focused on long-term objectives. The Nader campaign and crushing defeat was
an important testimonial to the contemporary hopelessness of running an
alternative candidate. Given his limited exposure to the population I don’t
think his campaign’s educational value was very great, and the outcome was a
moral defeat for those hopeful of alternative candidacies.

Furthermore, I don’t think we can dismiss the
arguments of people who argue for working within the Democratic Party,
trying to influence its choice, and supporting its ticket. The difference
between a rotten lesser evil and an extremely dangerous great evil can be
quite significant and can be the difference between millions of deaths and
much pain at home and abroad. At this point it seems clear that Al Gore
would almost surely not have been as terrible as George Bush, who even his
dad is finding a bit hard to take (giving the annual George Bush Award for
Public Service for 2003 to Senator Edward Kennedy). So what leftists are
afraid of is total irrelevance or possible default support for a greater
evil that can be pretty damned evil.

Another thing to keep in mind is that social
democrats and leftists “roll over dead” as commonly as Democrats. Blair,
Lula, Menem, Schroeder, Bob Rae—it is pretty systematic, reflecting the
power of the plutocratic establishment as fund-raisers, media guard-dogs,
and financial operators and corporate investors ready to defund or flee to
more hospitable investment climes. The system is working beautifully right
now, despite Bush’s current problems, which stem from his ability to violate
all international and moral norms up to this moment, which got him into a
morass a decent world would have prevented him entering.

ENGEL: A recent poll I saw showed that
for all the hype and ballyhoo among "progressive/leftist" publications,
Hillary Clinton, who gave no indication she's even running, was by far the
most popular Democratic "candidate" with 26% followed by Clark (!?) and
Lieberman (!!?) with about ten percentage points each. All the rest,
including Dean, were in the single digits. Kucinich, whose name is pushed
into my "inbox" daily, scored around 1%. Probably because, like Nader, he
has a "lock" on the lefty white college crowd, but very little name
recognition among blacks, Latinos and lower-middle class and "working class"
(is their still such a thing?) whites. Basically, Hillary is the only bona
fide Celebrity in the crowd.

You said, ""The left is essentially outside
the system, small, fragmented and even beyond marginalization."

Why is this so? Is there something "the
average American" (who or wherever he/she is) sees that leftists don't see?
I'm beginning to think that the people I read in print and on line and their
collective audience would fit into an average sized catering hall. In the
late eighties, the poet, Allen Grossman, told me that the actual audience
for serious poetry in the U.S. was about five thousand people. That's
poetry, which is important, but not essential to making decisions as an
informed adult. I see this as an extremely dangerous situation. What
"America" seems to be saying is that all serious scholarship and journalism
be relegated to a few journals, websites and publishing houses with a total
audience equal to the readership of that dead art (Weep for Adonais indeed!)
poetry. Possibly less.

HERMAN: The left is outside the system
in good measure because ordinary citizens—the “average American”--can never
hear its message, or if they do hear it, it is fleeting, short, and usually
presented in a dismissive context. Effective messages are those that are
repeated and attached to friendly symbols. Left messages being unfamiliar
they need lots of repetition and lots of space and time to counter
cognitive dissonance. They never get that. This of course reflects the fact
that the left has no numerous and financially solid power base, so it can’t
fund its messages and can’t provide them to that power base to firm up their
resolve and clarify their understanding of reality. The labor movement, the
natural power base, has not focused on this and its leaders have therefore
helped weaken themselves—for the most part these leaders were cold warriors
who even collaborated in subverting labor movements in countries like Brazil
in service to the corporate interest in a “favorable climate of
investment”—which called for weak or non-existent trade unions. In the
crucial formative years of broadcasting, 1927-1933, the top labor brass even
refused to support union-funded and controlled broadcasting, letting a
pioneer labor broadcaster fail, arguing that ad-based commercial media would
surely do justice to labor’s interests (as described in Robert McChesney’s
Telecommunications. Mass Media, and Democracy)! This left the
workers to watch CBS, NBC, and later ABC and Fox, to get their information
and world view, with the results we see in ignorance, depoliticization along
with a readily manipulable patriotism, and a marginalized left unable to
reach their potentially sympathetic audience with messages that might be
quite attractive if seen and heard. The decline and rightward trajectory of
the Labor Party in Britain is also traceable in part to the death of a
labor-supportive trio of major papers in the 1960s, which had given workers
not only news but arguments and principles supportive of their interests.
These were replaced by rightwing rags that featured tits, welfare mothers’
abuses, and attacks on liberals, the left, and governments (except
governments of the right, and the police and military segments of
government).

ENGEL: The "third option" you spoke of,
"steering entirely clear of the elections and going about other business
like grass roots organization, trying to build alternative media and other
projects focused on long-term objectives," seems to me to be the only
option. There is little use playing poker when you know the game is fixed
and every player at the table except yourself is part of the hustle.

Nevertheless, the Nader campaign was valuable
in a number of ways. No one I knew believed Nader would win; but we all
believed he could garner enough votes to allow the Greens to qualify for
federal funds. That he couldn't even do that much was less of a moral defeat
than a lesson in how impossible it is for a newcomer to ante up, put a chip
in the game. He may have had "limited exposure" in 2000, but he was Ralph
Nader, a household name. The entire experience could be likened to the
college football star, big man on campus, taking his first real beating at
the hands of the pros. Many illusions were shattered. Being laughed down
on Labor Day by macho union workers who waved posters of Hillary Clinton.
Attending all-white "rallies" where the focus was on celebrities and
pop-singers rather than rumpled old Ralph. Experiencing the hysterical
invective of Democrats who castigated you for "ruining the election." All
this capped by a stolen election made for what many considered a
radicalizing experience. The question was, and is, where do we go from
here. From my perspective it was a movement of "under-forty-year olds" and
college kids who got their asses kicked by the big boys. Having gone
through this experience, I think many of the Nader Greens of 2000 are a
politically mature lot, relative to the Mainstream Democrats and Republicans
who risked nothing, yet lost a great deal, albeit "painlessly."

HERMAN: Certainly there was a lesson in
the futility of third parties in the present U.S. electoral system, but
what follows from that is less clear. Shall we abandon electoral politics on
the ground that the game is fixed, focusing on the long run and organizing
to build a media and constituency in the long run?. There are several
problems with that approach. One is that, as Keynes said in deriding the
emphasis of economists on long run adjustments, in the long run we are all
dead, so that putting all our effort and money into trying to assure change
later is speculative and misses possibilities for doing something right now.
Further, the long run is a series of short runs, so that what we fail to do
today will have future consequences. Finally, it is hard to mobilize people
to do something with speculative future benefits when they are hurting and
eager for immediate or near-term results.

ENGEL: I think you raise some serious
questions when you say:

"I don’t think we can dismiss the arguments
of people who argue for working within the Democratic Party, trying to
influence its choice, and supporting its ticket. The difference between a
rotten lesser evil and an extremely dangerous great evil can be quite
significant and can be the difference between millions of deaths and much
pain at home and abroad. At this point it seems clear that Al Gore would
almost surely not have been as terrible as George Bush, who even his dad is
finding a bit hard to take (giving the annual George Bush Award for Public
Service for 2003 to Senator Edward Kennedy). So what leftists are afraid of
is total irrelevance or possible default support for a greater evil that
can be pretty damned evil."

First of all, if the left is as weak and
inconsequential is it appears to be, what would we be bringing to the
table? Look at what's been happening to black people year after year since
1968. The Democrats take it as a given that African-Americans, Latinos and
other minorities, but in particular African-Americans, are going to vote
Democrat. There may be threats of "we're mad as hell and we're not gonna
take it anymore," and maybe some kind of separatist movement, like Jesse
Jackson's Rainbow Coalition early on, but come November, those who vote are
going to vote Democrat. Who else are they going to vote for in a two-party
system? With the country swinging further and further to the right –
recent polls showed Republicans gaining across the board among every ethnic
group, Latinos and Jews in particular (Cubans against Castro and the Israel
Uber Alles crowd?). Some attribute this to the Democrats' flawed strategy
of putting all their money of the Presidential election while Republicans
court their own "rainbow coalition" for city, state and Congressional
elections.

Either way, especially in this polyarchy of
plutocrats, who's going to listen to a bunch of kids, college professors and
unemployed workers? Additionally, if we put our "chip in the game" (our
only chip) and bet on a Kucinich or someone like him, the DLC or other real
players will only add it to the stacks and stacks of chips that will be used
to support a Lieberman or a Clark (or a Hillary Clinton?) in preparation for
the Big Game against Dubya. What will the platform be? Some moderations of
the PATRIOT ACT, some military cuts, some medical benefits to the elderly;
more money to Israel; more "aid" to Columbia to fight the "drug war," etc.
Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only "leftists" who might catch the ear
of the Party machers might be of the cruise-missile variety, whose ranks
swell daily with additions of such "public intellectuals" as Michael Moore,
Arrianna Huffington, and various aging rock stars, movie actresses and other
celebrities whose semi-literate opinions carry far more weight in this
culture than Noam Chomsky's (or Edward Herman's).

On the other hand, whoever is in office in
2005 will inherit Bush's mess, even if it's Bush himself: economic nightmare
which Americans will sooner or later awaken from only to realize it was no
dream; War against Terrorism (Islam) which, by then, 1,000,000,000 Muslims
will realize, if they haven't already, is a Fundamentalist Christian/Zionist
war against them; and most important of all – in my opinion – an
Environment that not only votes Independent, but may very well vote to be
independent of the Human Race within the next five to ten years, rather than
the twenty to fifty years scientists had previously predicted.

Whoever is President two years from now is
going to take the blame for all of this. I wonder if Truman were alive and
head of the DLC, he might take a dive to allow Bush to face the cacophonous
music of the next four years until the "American People" are begging for an
FDR Democrat.

Then again, who knows what another four (or
forty) years of Bush Inc. might bring? Would he push that book of
Revelations fantasy to it's nuclear conclusion? Would the land of the free
and home of the brave roll over and die for PATRIOT II? Would Israel be
allowed to enact the "Final Solution" while it's puppet/patron took on the
three ring circus of the "axis of evil?"

HERMAN: The left is very weak, but
insofar as it can act at all it has to make choices. If it chooses to play
the electoral politics game, a good case can be made that it should try to
influence the Democratic Party to defeat the Clinton-Lieberman-DNC-New
Democrat grip on the electoral levers and permit at least a tolerable
Democrat that the left can support without retching (i.e., not Lieberman or
Clark), and who will at least hold the line and maybe even slightly reverse
the rightward shift. We need breathing and organizational space, and so does
the rest of the world, threatened with perpetual war, an arms race, and
further regression of environmental policy. The view that we should
purposely allow Bush to win so that the coming disaster will fall on his
head is not defensible. The disaster is not inevitable if he is ousted, but
a nasty one is pretty well assured with four more years of the cabal. Some
of them really want what we would consider a disaster (including a de facto
termination of constitutional government in this country).

ENGEL: Your statement, "The system is
working beautifully right now, despite Bush’s current problems, which stem
from his ability to violate all international and moral norms up to this
moment, which got him into a morass a decent world would have prevented him
entering," leads me to some questions about the Democrats and "international
and moral norms" that nobody has yet, to my knowledge, clearly answered:

a) Why on Earth did Al Gore let Bush get away
with stealing the election? Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, if it had
been Nader whose Presidency (and responsibility to those who voted to create
it) had been stolen like that, he would still be fighting it to this day.

b) Gulf "War" I was a "typical" war over land,
oil, a client dictator disobeying – or perhaps misunderstanding – orders
etc. The sanctions themselves, while costing ten times the damage in lives
and social and economic devastation as the "war" itself, was not atypical,
considering the ruthless use of embargoes used by great powers against small
in the past. But the "humanitarian" action in Kosovo was unprecedented.
Intelligent adults became like children in fifth grade history class as it
was explained that the United States along with its puny "partner" nation
states in NATO bombed Serbia to bits in order to prevent the alleged
genocidal attacks that just such a reckless, ruthless use of force
encouraged. What was the term they used, "humanitarian war?"

Could this have been a precedent for
Afghanistan and Iraq II? In Afghanistan, as in Bosnia, "we" bombed them to
bits to save them from themselves and the wicked Taliban, who dressed their
women like lampshades, then left it to crumble. Yet, as in Bosnia, American
troops remain. Scattered, almost forgotten.

Iraq is a bit more complex. We have to stay
there because of the oil, the WMD hype, or maybe just "because." Anyway,
Iraq II was a continuation of the "old" standard war begun in 1991.

Afghanistan, like Bosnia, was something
different. Beyond the "humanitarian" fairy-tales, what was it? The oil
that no one seems to be getting? I can't help but think that Bosnia was a
precedent, a test case that, successful in its "humanitarian goal" was left
to rot under the eyes of a few American army units (a nurse who worked for
my Doctor was a reservist called to serve there for a year, well after the
"successful" campaign). Likewise Afghanistan. The Clinton administration,
as it did with the Effective anti-Terrorism and Death Penalty Act which
morphed into the USA PATRIOT Act, set a precedent for the Bushites to
follow. But what was this precedent? Why the destruction of an already
war-torn country for no discernable purpose? Or perhaps I'm missing
something? Of course, the logical next step would be to bomb Israel as part
of our "humanitarian quest."

This is why I wonder whether the Bush
phenomenon is exactly that, a phenomenon, a virus in the system that must be
allowed to play itself out so the system can go back to "normal" again, or a
great leap rather than a "next step" from Clintonism to absolute military
corporatism. Again, no one is fooled by the Bosnia/Afghanistan charades
(Hitler Milosovic replaced by Hitler Bin Laden). But what was the political
purpose of these elaborate "drive-by shootings?" If, as you say, the system
is running beautifully, wanton destruction must be useful to the system. But
in what way?

HERMAN: The system can’t be counted on
to return to normal if we were to let the Bush “virus” play itself out. The
analogy is not a good one, as the Bush phenomenon is rooted in structural
facts whose strength is likely to be reinforced by Bush policies. For
example, the further concentration of the media will serve rightwing
interests in the future, just as the further growth of the military
establishment and police, and further Bush appointments to the courts, will
do the same.

I think the Balkans wars were very important
in setting the stage for the Bush wars: they represented a decline in and
perversion of the UN, a brazen violation of the UN Charter and rules of
war, and a lot of destruction and killing that were quite unnecessary and
rooted more in Western policy than in bad men in the Balkans (as described
in Diana Johnstone’s outstanding book
Fools’ Crusade, summarized in my long review at
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0203herman.htm). The political collapse of
the liberals and left in this case was also very important in clearing the
ground for the Bush wars, with their half-witted concept of humanitarian
intervention, that is still being peddled in The Nation magazine and
even in In These Times (see my “The Cruise Missile Left , Part 4: The
Nation Magazine’s Forum on ‘Humanitarian Intervention,” Swans, September
2003:
http://www.swans.com/library/art9/herman11.html). As you say, Clinton
really led the way to the Patriot Act with his Effective Antiterrorism and
Death Penalty Act, and he also led the way to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the
global “war on terror”—really “war OF terror”—with his fine effort in the
Balkans. Ousting the Clinton gang from domination of the Democratic Party,
while no guarantee of sanity given the institutional scene, would still be a
necessary step in at least delaying Armageddon.

ENGEL: For the past few weeks I've been
"arguing" publicly in articles such as "The
System Really Works" and "Republican" with Democrats who, failing to
recognize that the presidency was stolen from Gore by the Supreme Court, and
that Gore did nothing to fight for himself or his constituents, blame Greens
for Bush's destruction of "their country." In addition to pointing out
that the Democrats in Congress and the Senate gave Bush Inc. everything they
asked for, from War Powers to the USA PATRIOT ACT etc., I protested that
such "lesser-of-two-evilism" must end. However, in my reaction against
being told who to vote for and what to say, in addition to the ludicrous
fiction that all was "well and good" under Clinton or any other Democrat, I
failed to think practically. That is, what to do about Bush. I must admit,
I am one of those people you argued against by holding the "view that we
should purposely allow Bush to win so that the coming disaster will fall on
his head." I did not think "the disaster is not inevitable if he is
ousted, but a nasty one is pretty well assured with four more years of the
cabal," and perhaps I was a bit cavalier in believing myself one of those
who "want what we would consider a disaster (including a de facto
termination of constitutional government in this country)." I have not
been looking at November 2004 with clear eyes. Then again, that's one of
the reasons for this interview. I'm not standing on steady ground.

Is the only choice we have then, at least to
give ourselves some "breathing room" as you called it, to vote Democrat,
hopefully for a Kucinich or some other progressive minded Democrat? If so,
what if it's not Kucinich, but Clark or Lieberman? It would be less painful
if we really did have some say to put up a Kucinich who would at least try
to repeal some of the damage done, but it seems more likely the "anti-Bush"
will be of the DNC variety. Are we stuck with the "choice" of "anyone but
Bush (which to me means DNC)?

HERMAN: Recent developments suggest
that the DNC is very unhappy about Dean, and Gore’s endorsement has put them
in a rage over the betrayal of a true DNC man, Lieberman. The New York Times
has been equally enraged, after their front page accolade to that “centrist”
Lieberman, and this regrettable shift to “the left”! These creeps can’t
stand the slightest trace of populism or any lightening up of the imperial
thrust. They pretend that the people want a centrist, which Lieberman is
not, and that such a move to the left will be fatal electorally. The DNC
crowd and mainstream media have been playing this game for years, even as
their preferred centrist and center-right candidates get eviscerated
(Clinton excepted, though his terms coincided with crushing losses for
Democrats in the states and federal legislatures). I believe the DNCers
prefer a Republican to even a mildly liberal and centrist Democrat like
Dean, and they might sell him out as they did McGovern in 1972. They would
surely never support a Kucinich, and of course the Free Press would savage
Kucinich, and they have been pretty nasty to Dean as well, just as they have
been kissing Bush ass as he moves from one looting and murder operation to
the next.

So our effective political choices are narrow,
and the DNC crowd would make them even narrower if they could, and they are
trying hard. We always face a lesser and great evil choice, and in my
lifetime, while I’ve occasionally voted for third party sure losers as a
conscious protest vote, I’ve also consciously voted for several lesser evil
scoundrels who I considered to be war criminals. The greater evil scoundrels
clearly threatened even more massive war crimes, as George Bush does today.
This reflects a gruesome political system, that has reached new lows in the
last few years.